Guinea - Indigenous Religion
Whatever their formal religious affiliation, Guineans regarded themselves as living in intimate association with the supernatural world. Followers of Islam and Christianity in urban as well as rural areas had not entirely renounced their commitment to the ancestral and nature cults but had attempted to fit them into the framework of their adopted religion.
Beliefs in geniuses and fetishes, worship of ancestors, sacrificial and initiatory rites, power of sorcerers, form the centerpieces of the ancient religions of West Africa, classified under the generic term of animisms and which is sometimes call fetishism. Animism is the metaphysico-religious conception which introduces a multiplicity of beings, built on the prototype of the human soul, as intermediaries between God and man, created, invisible geniuses, but sometimes assuming material forms. powerful but defeated on occasion, by the compensatory forces of a fetish.
The myths mention evil geniuses to which all misfortunes are attributed. They appear as foreigners at large gatherings, at parties and at funerals. They are the ones who, by sleeping with pregnant women, harassed by dreams, produce monsters. Against this danger, women protect themselves by appropriate amulets. Wizards are able to annihilate the harm from genii by spells.
All Guinean animist societies make use of the mask. A mock sacral in nature, the mask participates, in symbiosis with its bearer, in the supernatural power of the entity, ancestor or genius it represents. It remains feared even when it intervenes as entertainment in the public festivities (Doudou in Baga country). Beyond its belonging to the order of material things, since it is mostly made of wood and fibers, except in the case of certain Malinke masks in skin and hair (Kondén), it is seized as an emanation of the sacred. Myths often say this is discovered by the ancestors in the soil or in the water, thus demonstrating its support character of telluric or aquatic divinities. The diversity of masks is surprising. Among the Toma simply, among the most common of the assessors of the spirits, two are the most feared because they reveal the crimes of sorcery, poisonings and adulteries.
Everything in the world—animate or inanimate, living or dead — is believed to have its own nyama (soul or spirit, in Malinké) whose existence is independent of its material form. To believers the nyama is not a diffuse and impersonal spirit; it is distinct and personal, a property of concrete objects and specific phenomena. For them there is a nyama for each tree but not for trees generally; there is a nyama for each man but not for mankind. According to the belief, each distinct plot of ground has its nyama, as does every rock or rain cloud and every growing thing. Each object is believed to have a will, a personality, and a distinctiveness.
Depending on differences in geographic regions and economic activities, such beliefs concentrate on various aspects of nature. For example, the wet element predominates among fishermen along the coast, where belief in a water genie, Sata-Bo, is prevalent. Surviving pre-Islamic beliefs among the Peul center on the bull and the use of sour milk in life-cycle ceremonies. In Malinké country all rites have some connection with the earth. In many villages the crocodile is worshiped. According to this view, the natural and the supernatural are integral parts of the everyday world.
Spirits of founding ancestors and of natural phenomena associated with ancestral land are considered most important', and the principal responsibility for dealing with them rests with the family or the lineage. They are not only objects of the family cult, but they are also the nyama of men or of things. The ancestral cult is generally the most important bond uniting a kin group. The head of the family lineage is also its chief priest, who attempts to bring about or to maintain a desirable relationship with the supernatural. Accordingly he alone has the right to communicate with the nyama of the ancestors, and he does so on behalf of the members of the group. Thus to be successful every undertaking of the group — clearing the land, sowing, reaping, hunting, housebuilding — required the previous consent and goodwill of the deities concerned, each of which must be approached through invocation, sacrifice, prayer, or other appropriate ritual.
In order to facilitate the deceased's rest in the afterlife, his family must immolate a chicken at his funeral, on pain of seeing him become a govmotai (wizard-spirit, wandering continually and miserably, constantly importuning the living who have it neglected). When a misfortune occurs, the consulted soothsayer usually attributes the cause to the tormented soul of this or that ancestor and prescribes sacrifices to appease the anger of the spirit of the deceased.
In addition to general participation in ancestral cults, the men of a community — and sometimes the women — may belong to mystery cults, the so-called secret societies. The best known are the Poro society for men and the Sande society for women, which are most active in the southern and coastal areas of the country. Membership is by initiation rather than birth, and the same cult may have members in several different communities.
Almost everyone has regular recourse to diviners, healers, spell casters, makers of protective amulets and charms, or other specialists in the supernatural. Each practitioner has his own way of dealing with the supernatural and is apt to have more or less regular clients who hire his services whenever the need arises. Treated on a private, individual basis, each case must be separately analyzed and prescribed for.
Diseases and death were generally perceived as a culmination of natural and metaphysical causes. Metaphysical causes entail the spiritual realm such as witchcraft and punishment from God or ancestral spirits for breaking taboos and various forms of transgressions.
The widespread use of talismans, made and sold by healers and diviners and worn by West Africans around their foreheads and necks, or tied with leather straps round their body and arms, is a constant reminder of hybridised forms of healing. Their usage denotes an ongoing regional symbiosis in terms of the understanding of misfortune and illness.
Differences between Islamic, Christian, and indigenous beliefs were less deep than the gulf separating a religious from a nonreligious outlook. In the late 1950s, in line with its rationalist, Marxist-tinted orientation, Sékou Touré Parti Démocratique de Guinée (PDG) began to conduct a "debunking" campaign (campagne de démystification). It was, in reality, an attempt to gain total control of people's minds. But it also represented a genuine concern to uproot superstitions that were considered incompatible with modern progress and to protect gullible people from unscrupulous practitioners.
Elements of traditional religious systems came under attack first. The beliefs in genies, sorcery, the cult of ancestors, sacrifices, and initiation rites were lumped together under the label fetishism (fetish worship), and the PDG set out to suppress them. The campaign against fetishism was mounted through the radio and the press in the different vernaculars. Each party federation was asked to make public the secrets surrounding initiation rites and to expose sorcerers and fakes. With the help of the militia, fetishes and masks were collected, exhibited in public, and burned at great public autos-da-fé.
The wearing of amulets, talismans, and various charms as protection against evil forces continued to be prevalent in towns as well as in rural areas. Some Muslim teachers made and sold charms that purported to make the buyer pass an examination, win a lover, or punish an enemy.
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